


Richie Tozier Presents: A Little Louder for the People in the Back

by isoscele



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Fix-It, M/M, Major Character Undeath, Post-Apocalypse, The Turtle CAN Help Us (IT), Time Travel, Zombies, and bribe it until it lets you correct your mistakes, hot tip kids: if stuck in a post-apocalyptic scenario make your own god, if sufficiently motivated with snacks
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-03
Updated: 2020-04-19
Packaged: 2021-02-28 01:07:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 14,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22995190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isoscele/pseuds/isoscele
Summary: Some of Richie's goals for the coming week, in no particular order:1. Figure out what turtles eat.2. Prevent the zombie apocalypse.3. Save Eddie for reals this time.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 18
Kudos: 36





	1. Set 1

**Author's Note:**

> A misappropriation of happy endings, the world's deadliest shopping cart, and a few ways not to cook a fish.
> 
> (warnings for this chapter include mild suicidal thoughts, mentions of canonical self-harm, and canon-typical amounts of vomit and violence)

_ Theme song comes to an end, and scene opens on Richie "Trashmouth" Tozier strutting through the bloodstained streets of Manhattan, carrying a baseball bat with a pair of ladies' panties wrapped around the handle. A zombie pops out from a Dumpster, groaning as it stumbles down the street, and Tozier takes its head off with one clean swing. _

_TOZIER (to camera): Sheesh, that guy was gonna bite my head off! Makes me nostalgic for my girlfriend._

_Cue laugh track._

* * *

Richie finishes  _ The Road Back  _ outside his tent on the bank of the creek. Then he flips back through the last chapter, holds it upside-down, and presses his grimy, ragged fingernails against the last page in the hope of uncovering one last secret message that means the self-deprecating father of two didn’t get his head blown off, and Richie didn’t just waste the last two months of his life. 

“Are you seeing this shit?” he says to the handful of guppies spit-roasting over his camp stove. “Motherfucker went and killed  _ Nathan.  _ And he left Cam alive! Cam’s a dumbass, he should’ve tripped over his own dick and fallen into a zombie horde in Chapter Three.” 

He imagines that the guppies, righteously pissed about the death of what was easily the best character in the book, are twitching in total agreement.  _ For sure, and the whole contagious blood thing wasn’t how it went down at all. _ Most people would be embarrassed to end up talking to their dinners after like, four months max of near-solitude, but this is actually a fairly predictable turn of events for Richie. He used to chat with his fake plants, the zit on the back of his neck, and on one agonizing occasion, Daniel Tosh for over two hours, so. He’s had worse.

Flawless literary critique or no, the fish taste like Sonia Kaspbrak’s left nipple and form a low simmer of despair in the pit of Richie’s stomach as he settles by the water and tries not to throw up. The creek burbles cheerfully, a tantalizing pit of horrible disease that he wants to drink from  _ so bad. _

Richie used to cry a lot, but then severe dehydration happened, and that kind of killed the vibe. Now he puts on a smile for his studio audiences, and drops the kinds of catchphrases that kids could imitate on the playground. He likes to imagine that this whole shit-wheel is an action movie, but sometimes he mixes genres a little- like, he’ll drop a joke and wait too long for the laugh track before he remembers that it’s not coming. He imagines that whoever’s previewing this shit is giving it the worst IMDB review ever. The kind of thing that could kill his career.

He knows that he’s not in a good movie. In good movies, the comic relief doesn’t make it to the end.

So Richie cleans his plastic assortment of plate, knife, and fork. He gets his hands cold, really cold. Holds them just under the surface until they stop feeling like any kind of extension of him, stop feeling like anything he’s ever touched. He looks at the sky, and feels dizzy for no reason, and when he looks back down, a turtle is sunning itself on a rock. 

_ The  _ turtle is sunning itself on a rock. 

“Hey!” he shouts. He skids down the rest of the bank on his hands and knees. “Dream turtle!”

Dream Turtle continues to dolefully chew the bloody shoelace it’s found.

“Quit hogging the spotlight,” Richie says, for lack of anything better. “Get in line behind-” stupidly, tragically, he can think of no female celebrities to round out the joke.

His problem is that he doesn’t  _ know- _ he doesn’t know why his dreams are so invariably filled with the smooth, cobbled tortoiseshell pattern, the leathery feet. Last night, he’d been behind the wheel of a racecar, like in that Will Ferrell movie, head stuck all the way out the window, hair caught in the rough circuit of wind and smoke, and it had been fantastic, and his dashboard talked to him in his mom’s voice and reminded him to get his vitamin C where he could, baby, if the rotting piles of mobile flesh didn’t get him the scurvy would. The sun throbbing to the pitch of  _ not-dead-not-dead,  _ his head a helium balloon through the sunroof, 

But the memorable part, after the crowd started screaming for a reason he could no longer remember, just as he had skidded round that last critical bend and the sky had gone so dark he could taste it, was when he rolled the window down and his mother said  _ don’t forget--  _ and there was Dream Turtle. 

And Richie had said,  _ hey Mr. Turtle, what’s the haps?  _ and Dream Turtle had said,  _ could be better, Rich,  _ and in his eyes galaxies were folded like fitted sheets. And a little sprig of lettuce was sticking out of his mouth and people were dancing on it- little people impossibly lit by a huge starburst of light-

_ Could be better, Rich  _ Dream Turtle had said, and then Richie had woken up to a day already ten degrees hotter than the day before, and the world was exactly as ended as it had been when he fell asleep.

Richie rigs up his complicated Anti-Zombie system of kazoos and alarm bells and then zips up the tent as far as it’ll go, which is not that far because he stole it from his agent’s basement last September and the bag had been molding already. He scoots up into his sleeping bag until he’s nice and cozy and the dried blood on his jeans isn’t scraping up his ass too much. 

He reaches for  _ The Road Back  _ and flips to his favorite chapter, the one where Maura and Danny are trapped on the banks of the flooded French Broad and making fun of each other’s breaststroke. He reads all the way up until they start to kiss in the waist-deep water, and then he reads the piranha bit because he can’t not, and then he really is going to shut the book this time, he’s going to shut it and go to sleep and not think about-

Bill looks so good in the photo in the back. It’s really sort of criminal. When Richie was in his twenties, his hair was cut almost to the scalp and he thought stubble made him look older, instead of like if a subway rat had sex with his uncle Bernie, rolled the offspring in garbage, and shuttled it into the Boy Scouts. But Bill looks like the kind of kid who’s totally never even heard of a receding hairline, who sat in his room and ate flavorless croutons for twenty-one years and then decided to make up for it on the eve of his emergence by being flawless at sex and really polite to your mother. Like a vampire, but the kind of vampire Bill would write- stilted dialogue, never quite sure what his purpose is in the scene, probably named Archibald.

“You bastard,” Richie says to the photo. “Nathan getting shot was pure shock value, and you know it. If you can’t write a book that sells without killing all the best dudes, go back to writing opera reviews and instruction packets for Chia Pets.”

Is this what grief feels like, now his bones have already been totally eaten up by all his older, lamer griefs? He imagines that the inside of his body is like a tomato leaf, and death is the Very Hungry Caterpillar that surrounds it. He sets the book on his stomach and stares up at the canvas sky. He tries to find dicks in the wrinkled fabric, but he’s been sleeping in this moth-eaten hobbit hole for eighty-one days, and he might be out of dicks.

Richie went camping with Wentworth a couple times in middle school, and exactly once with the Losers. They’d forgotten the bag that had most of their food, so they’d subsisted on pickles and whipped cream for most of the night. He remembers some of it- the campfire popping like the Fourth of July, the way Bill had pulled out an acoustic guitar, assuming his role as the worst person at every party Richie’s ever been to, but Mike had rescued it and played it like a god. He remembers cheating at gin, and getting egregiously offended when Stan suggested that he was probably cheating at gin, and then he and Eddie had gotten in each other’s faces, shouting about democracy and fair play and the land of the brave, and then on the next game they both cheated as compromise.

He remembers waking up in the middle of the night, tent stinking with pickle-breath, and the stifling warmth of everyone curled into each other and breathing like some massive single-celled organization that like, eats whole trees. It was raining. The rain sounded like tires on gravel, and shimmied down the half-lit edges of the tent. 

Richie props himself up on his elbows. He scratches the half-healed bite mark on his forearm. He wants to look at Bill’s picture again, the twenty-five-year-old who’s already forgotten about Pennywise, and the hot blood smell of the sewers, and the crackling little voice at the back of his brain that says  _ don’t let any of those characters get out of town, B-b-billy boy, you don’t know what they’ll find when they come back.  _

Richie stares at the confusing book cover until the embossed name digs into his brain like an Etch-a-Sketch. “You better be writing something real fucking groundbreaking right about now, Mr. W. Denbrough.”

He rolls over, tastes sweat and something else at the back of his mouth, and goes to sleep.

In Richie’s dream, he’s sauteing a fish on the empty Radio City stage while Eddie watches. He nails the flip, because he is the fucking best, and then does the weird pan-shaking thing his dad always did when he was making embarrassing attempts to flirt with Richie’s mom in the kitchen at eight in the morning. 

“Here’s the trick, Eds,” he says. “You gotta put your  _ hips  _ into it.” He accompanies this with a hip-thrust that almost makes him drop the pan.

“When you break your foot, I’m not driving you to the emergency room,” Eddie says. Richie’s so jubilant that Eddie’s  _ talking  _ in his dreams now, instead of just smiling and staring and bleeding out through his mouth, that he really does drop the pan.

“I  _ told  _ you,” Eddie says. “What the fuck is wrong with you, was that hot? If you got burned-”

“I’m fine,” Richie tells him. It’s a little like getting deadlighted again, except that instead of the knife-blade of hot white screaming  _ thing  _ spreading over him like boiling water, it’s an ecstatic well of warmth and noise, still stubbornly scorching everything it touches. Eddie’s  _ talking  _ to him. Eddie thinks he’s an asshole, Eddie wants to check him for burns, nothing has to die! Nothing ever has to die! 

Richie loves this world he lives in, this staggering, puking, untethered, bleeding-out-of-its-asshole world in which everything drags itself back up eventually.

“Aren’t you here to do a show?” Eddie says. “Did all these people pay half their fucking mortgages to see you drop things on yourself?”

“You wouldn’t believe my charm,” Richie says. He could’ve sworn the audience was empty, but obviously it’s not because Eddie says there’s people to entertain so there must be. When he looks back, six thousand reassuring faces gaze back at him, all pleasantly blurred.

Richie tells a couple of jokes. He can’t make out the individual words, but he knows the cadence of a good set. The crowd is roaring, the crowd is screaming like in gladiator Rome, spitting light out of all their eyeballs. He stands on the stage as it bends and wobbles like a bouncy house, and sings his alcoholic comedian lullaby to a stadium full of long white teeth, gnashing their approval after every zinger.

At one point, he turns around and Eddie is- okay, he swears he’s not making fun, but Eddie looks about seven feet tall and the light isn’t hitting him right. Richie’s skin  _ hurts  _ like a high-grade fever, and Eddie hasn’t laughed once so far.

“Hey,” he says, suddenly very afraid, very thirteen. “Don’t you like it?” In the arcade, neon pulsing from every orifice of every machine, holding a token like a barrier between skins,  _ wanna play again?  _

“I love it,” Eddie says. He isn’t smiling. 

“Okay,” Richie says. “This is my own shit this time, you know. Real high-class. All-natural mom jokes.”

Eddie sprouts another couple inches, shoulder-first. The gauze on his cheek wraps and wraps around his chin, still with the same innocuous damp spot of blood. 

“Grass-fed mom jokes,” Richie says feebly. 

“I’m sorry,” Eddie says, and  _ this  _ is bad because Eddie’s voice doesn’t sound like that, like it’s being scraped across a hockey field of nails, and the venue is hot and gummy and  _ pink,  _ spittle dripping persistently from the ceiling and-

Richie’s dad was a dentist, and Richie interned at the office for a summer when he was sixteen, because it was that or babysit his neighbor’s kids. And when kids- when people bite you, it always smells like Clorox wipes and laughing gas and usually all it means is they don’t get a Superball at the end, it doesn’t mean anything, it doesn’t have to  _ mean  _ anything-

“I would laugh if you remembered what my laugh sounds like,” Eddie says. “If this is wrong, it’s your fault.”

The crowd howls. 

“I remember,” Richie says. His pulse is hammering against his throat like a Little League batting cage. “Of course I- Eddie, the clown is dead, I’m not forgetting.”

“No clown this time,” Eddie says. He has probably two million teeth, and they’re all flat and straight and bursting like stars against his lips. “You’ve just plain lost me.”

“Eddie,” Richie says through cotton lips. He can feel the doll wringing its way from inside him, the little mannequin boy only quiet in his own coffin. He remembers, his hands were still when he walked into that room in Neibolt. His hands weren’t shaking. “Eddie, hey- don’t say stuff like that. I’ve got control now. It doesn’t have to- not if I don’t want-”

“Oh, please,” Eddie says, voice as thick and red as the curtains. “Tell me more about what you  _ want.” _

The lights spin in tight circles, and sweat breaks hard against the back of his neck. It’s so hot in here, and damp, and his brain feels loose and muggy, like the guppies he’d roasted, singed, bubbling, skin melting off into something softer, something to tear at-

“Eds?” Richie manages. “‘M I dying?”

Eddie turns and looks at him. “Why would you think that?”

“I think something bad is happening to me,” Richie says. “I think- I think this is maybe what it feels like. Eddie? Is this what it feels like?”

If this is what it feels like- all his cells little individual bushfires, the high sweet taste of spit at the back of his throat- maybe he can finally stop dreaming of teeth. Stop waiting at the banks of the river for the other shoe to drop.

Eddie distorts in the corner of Richie’s vision. The room starts to fill with water, like all his nightmares have been comparing notes and currently feel inadequate. The Eddie-skeleton fills the room, drips from the stage. The lights behind him crack.

And then Richie looks out into the audience, the swarming dark pit of attention that used to keep him standing, and all he can see is the  _ fucking- _

“Turtle!” Richie howls, crashing through the zipper of his tent. He immediately sets off his own Anti-Zombie system, loses his footing, and slides down the bank, mud caking up his ankles. He’s still tangled in Silly String and jingle bells, glasses cracked, his whole body shaking from the residual burningfirefevershattering, but he narrowly stops himself from falling ass-first into the river by grabbing a fistful of sedge. “Dream Turtle! I’m talkin’ to you, space cowboy!”

Dream Turtle is sunning himself on a rock. The shoelace is gone and has been replaced by a plastic straw, which Dream Turtle is stubbornly trying to get his idiot mouth around, like the world’s dumbest Capri-Sun commercial. He doesn’t look at Richie.

“Hey!” Richie screams. “Fuck you! Fuck you  _ very  _ much, you Franklin-looking asshole!”

Dream Turtle still won’t look at him, like he’s too good to turn his goddamn turtle head after  _ months  _ of showing up only at the end of Richie’s worst most fire-filled dreams. Richie hurls a fistful of pebbles, which bounce like hail off Dream Turtle’s smooth, yellowed shell. For a second, the shitty possessed ViewMaster of scenes from 1989 that lives permanently in Richie’s brain screams  _ rock war!  _ and then congeals entirely over with blood.

“You’re the worst kind of childhood pet,” Richie shouts. He grabs another handful of rocks and flings them. “You’re for the sad kids whose parents didn’t think they were responsible enough for a goddamn dog. You’re  _ nothing.  _ You look like Mitch McConnell! Yeah, I went there, you leathery-ass reptilian  _ bitch!”  _

The turtle turns to look at his assailant, fucking  _ finally,  _ and Richie’s breath jumps obnoxiously in his throat. Cold water is starting to seep through the soles of his shoes, dirt and infection lapping at his bare ankles. The fear comes all at once, a familiar song-and-dance, but overlaid above it is a yowling, heart-stopping despair. 

A bell jigs loose from Richie’s shoulder and crashes onto the dirt with a dry tinkle. Richie jams his hands in his pockets, breathing harder than he ever has in his life. He watches the water rip the ground apart, this snarling hungry wound that fills all the space made for it. 

After a moment, he throws both middle fingers into the air and stalks toward the city.

Richie’s day is totally zombilicious. He breathes the stink of hot infected blood on the tarmac for nine fucking hours as he checks on the rotting apartments, drugstores, and venues in Fuck-If-He-Knows Nebraska. The streets are swamped. It’s the heat, he thinks. It draws the dead out like fruit flies into the rotting meat of downtown. July is a bad month- has been since he was a kid, letting his knees scab over in the filthy shadow of the sewers. 

Richie kills monsters, because he believes he can. Richie kills monsters with a baseball bat and a gnarly bit of pipe and so many Molotov cocktails that he’s honestly gotten a little tired of making Molotov cocktails, which is a surefire sign that his life is cool as shit. He checks in on survivors when he can. There’s little clumps here and there, because humanity is sturdy and in love with itself and no amount of shambling, aching, bodiless fucks are gonna tear that apart. Most of ‘em he just watches, like a creep, through the little slits between cardboard edges on the windows and the holes burned in the curtains. 

He brings food to Mrs. Ribalda and her little boys sometimes, shows up arms loaded down with plastic bags of sardines and black-eyed peas and boxes of Saltines with the moldy ones thrown out. They’re the only people he really talks to anymore. He’ll knock on the door and pretend to be a post-apocalyptic UberEats driver, which is one of many really good bits that he’s developed now that he’s without a stage or a podcast or a team of politically-moderate ghostwriters. 

Richie feels human, in the breeze of the box fans lining their crumbling apartment like an offering. He carries Luis and Damián on his arms, less because he has any muscle and more because the apocalypse breeds kids like cattails, reed-thin and hollowed by the humidity. He tries out all the impressions he learned when he was twenty-five and a coke addict and the sister he barely remembered was starting to pop out babies: the Goofy and Donald Duck that he cultivated on his rotting sofa, always hungover and sick and scared, sloping his voice into Bugs Bunny’s because it was the only way he could think of to become part of the world again. 

In the end, though, he always shuts their door behind him and listens for the slide of the deadbolt, and ambles back down the zombie-clogged streets still yapping to himself in an overly-nasal Porky the Pig. He didn’t learn loneliness from the end of the world, but he learned his place in it pretty good. He remembers hot breath against his shoulder, the  _ chk-chk-chk  _ of bullets like a neverending rimshot. He remembers cleaning blood off his glasses in the quarry a million years ago. He’s learned his place in a lot of things, since then. 

Richie’s worldly possessions include a whole box set of shitty post-apocalyptic novels written by renowned author William Denbrough, a handgun that he took off a decaying taxi driver and still doesn’t know how to use, and a shopping cart covered in knives. He calls the last one his Kickass Racecar of Death and Bargain Yogurt, or Krodby. By all rights, Richie should have a belligerent morally-gray robot pal by this point in the apocalypse, but Krodby is the next best thing because Krodby is going to get him to the good Wal-Mart across from the Michael’s, and Richie is going to gorge himself on Gushers until he dies happy. This is his only goal for the foreseeable future. 

Richie’s body normally feels very much not like any kind of body at all, but today he’s skidding down the empty road and feels totally, totally elastic. He’s got one foot kicking himself along, like a scooter, and none of the local undead fucknuggets are gonna come anywhere near him, not when he’s zipping along like the deadliest fucking Paul Blart: Mall Cop on the planet. He’s got a whole can of pears in the child’s seat, found in a ditch off the highway, and he can already taste the sugar, slow and syrupy and maybe a little cool against his tongue. Richie rarely lets himself believe that his days will be good days, especially when they start like this- the heat of the dream, Eddie’s fractured voice, the Turtle- but he might salvage this rodeo yet.

That’s until he makes it to the mall and finds it burned to the ground.

He trips on his way down, and one of the knives duct-taped to Krodby’s hard shell cuts a deep gouge across his hand. He puts it in his mouth instinctively, sucks at the blood welling up between his teeth. For a moment, he can just focus on that.

The problem isn’t that Richie doesn’t expect violence. He expects it everywhere he turns. Ruin dogs his footsteps on the daily, and not even in a cool kind of way, like with the guys who don’t look at explosions in movies. The problem is that he  _ knows  _ the people in this town, even the ones who don’t know him. Some are depressed, some lash out, some are doing their honest best to die. There are looters, delinquents, and white supremacists. But there’s nobody stupid enough to torch their most consistent source of food and ammo, and Richie will swear that until his dying day.

Which may be sooner than he’d thought. God _ dammit.  _

What this means, other than imminent starvation, is one of two things. One, there’s some motherfucker out there who’s new in town and determined to bring the world to its knees. They’re probably a bit of a bigot, maybe overfond of carnage, and they’re going to keep burning buildings and blowing up roads and maybe, eventually, killing survivors head-on in some pathetic power play until everyone gets scared, and suspicious, and the fragile balance that Richie relies on goes  _ kaput. _

Or two, the zombies have evolved and are starting to strategize.

Richie sits down in front of the ruined Waffle House and digs his fingers into his scalp. He has to concentrate, regroup, figure out what the  _ fuck  _ he’s going to do next. If he should leave. If he even can. If anywhere is safer than here, Buttfuck Nebraska with its beautiful people and single stoplight and the tent that catches rain with an old kind of reverence. Richie has to know what his next steps are, but he also feels his limbs tearing apart like sap, his brain sagging into the dents left by his fingers. 

He really wants a waffle. With pecans, and whipped butter, and the pulpiest fucking OJ they can make. He wants it with blueberries. He wants strong coffee and nineteen packets of sugar. The hunger is a low, constant hum- like a mosquito buzzing in his ear, except not quite. More like the mosquito’s blood, the blood it took from him, smeared across the shadowed side of his neck. That stickiness. The original summer’s violence. Richie wants syrup unspooling from the fork like a slow exsanguination.

When Richie opens his eyes again, he’s flat on his back. The sky is one smooth run of gray, soft and unbroken, except he can’t appreciate it because his glasses have been cracked since mid-February. Sometimes he thinks that he should just get rid of them. He can’t possibly do a worse job navigating the apocalypse blind than he’s doing right now. 

“Shit,” he says. All the feelings he can normally press deep down into his own personal sewer of horror are bubbling up, and now he’s acutely aware of how his whole body hurts, how his forearm is on fire, how hungry and tired and fed-up he is. He’s mourning, too, because he tries not to be such a downer but sometimes he can’t help it. The loss is like a pair of keys in his pocket- he spends so much time obsessively touching the outline through his jeans, just to make sure it’s where he left it, that he knows its shape as intimately as his own fingers. Sometimes, he checks and there’s nothing there, and his chest explodes in a swooping, panicky emptiness, but he always close around it eventually. Which is why now there’s gravel in his mouth and dirty blood on his favorite Hawaiian shirt and his brain is looping through Mike Hanlon’s Best Smiles Compilation at 1.75x speed. “Motherfucking cowabunga shit fuck  _ I want a waffle.” _

Richie thought that he hit rock bottom three years ago, when he was a friendless, unfunny gay loser whose target audience was everyone who would have dumped trash in his backpack in middle school. He wishes he could talk to that guy now, say  _ what’s up Trashmouth, I know you think you have nothing left to lose but that’s only because you’ve already lost them and you don’t know that you have a Two Losses For the Price of One bargain deal on those fuckers. And if your coke problem doesn’t kill you and your drinking problem doesn’t kill you, your zombie problem will, so you ruin your liver real good and maybe it’ll be less tasty later.  _ And then he wishes he could eat everything in that guy’s kitchen, which if he remembers correctly was mostly dry Cap’N Crunch and a thing of artisanal ketchup.

“Stop being dramatic, you little bitch,” Richie tells himself. Something howls in his head- a laugh track, he decides. One thing he’s learned, all his years in comedy, is that most kinds of emotion sound the same at their peaks, and the word  _ hysterical  _ covers a lot of ground. So his dreams aren’t filled with screaming people or crying people or wounded people anymore. They’re all just laughing. “Boo hoo, your favorite Walmart was torched by post-apocalyptic hooligans. Cry me a fucking river.”

Richie rolls onto his knees and then gets to his feet. He does it slow, because no one’s around to make fun of his forty-five-year-old knees. And then, once he’s cracked his spine and rubbed the sticky bloodstained gravel from his sleeve and adjusted his glasses, he looks up.

Stan is standing two feet away.

Richie straight-up can’t breathe.

“What?” he says. His voice sounds funny, like it’s coming from underground, and it cracks like just being here has made him twelve again. Hysterical. Hysterical, hysterical. “Staniel?”

It’s not Stan. It can’t be Stan. Richie doesn’t know much about this city, and he doesn’t know much about wherever Stan lived, but he knows those two places are several states away from each other. And zombies usually stick to their usual haunts, unless someone says very quietly  _ please, please come with me  _ and gets a rope to tie around both of their little fingers so it feels like a tether, not a leash, and carries a baseball bat but never lifts it- and, and Richie would have put money on Stan having never set foot in a Dick’s Sporting Goods in his life, so it’s  _ fine,  _ it’s not Stan, it doesn’t even  _ look  _ like him.

Except Richie never got to meet any version of Stan other than the one that lives forever on the lip of the quarry. Any brown-haired, nervous-looking, geeky adult could have been the one that kid fumbled his way into being. And nothing is gone anymore like it used to be, so Richie could have already met him. Richie could have launched a Molotov cocktail into his birdcage-chest and watched it smolder. 

The zombie has cuts on his wrists, snarled like open jaws. 

Richie wants to do something ugly and vulnerable, like take another few steps and let Almost-Stan open his mouth. Examine the soft, childlike pink of his gums. Count the teeth. There’s some animal that you count the teeth of, he thinks, to tell how old they are. How much time they got. Richie wants a hug, and he kind of wants it to be the last thing he ever gets.

There’s a type of warmth that comes from an open mouth and nothing else. It’s set apart from summer’s hideous breath, like its own private and immortal season. You lean into it. You close your eyes. You think  _ okay, it’s all gonna be okay now. _

Richie doesn’t do any of that. Instead, he takes a running leap at Krodby and squeezes his eyes shut as he starts to move. By the time he opens them again, he’s sailing away, fingers already sealing to the handle with blood. 

_ “Turtle!”  _ Richie screams. He skids so hard down the bank that he ends up ankle-deep in the water, which is cold as  _ balls  _ despite the obscene heat of everything else. “Turtle, hey, Turtle, look at me- look at me, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean it. With the rocks. I didn’t mean it.”

Dream Turtle lifts its head and examines him. Richie read somewhere once that turtles can see a whole extra color, so maybe all the blood on Richie’s shirt is something really really beautiful in its eyes, something Richie could never imagine. 

“I brought you something.” Richie says. He considers for half a second, decides  _ fuck it,  _ and sits down in the water. Goosebumps shudder into flocks along his waist and stomach, and he feels protected, somehow, from the hungry and desiccated July. He pulls out the can of pears and stabs it with his crazy Wolverine fingernails. He lets the juice stream out onto his nonbloodied arm and then holds it out.

Dream Turtle looks at him, unimpressed.

“I’m sorry,” Richie says. He’s crying a little bit. “This morning was a major beep-beep, my friend. Trashmouth Fuckup Hall of Fame, for sure.” Water rushes past his crossed legs, unaffected by the barrier his body makes. His feet are numb. He has barely enough presence of mind to keep his currently-open wounds out of the water, and he doesn’t know for how much longer.

He scoots closer. At some point, there’s gotta be a distinction between what he has and hasn’t done to deserve this, because every day  _ this  _ becomes a little harder to handle and he has no idea where the cap is. So, if he thinks that he ran into a mimic of his dead best friend from childhood and lost his prime source of food in the same day because he spent twenty-seven years as a depressed asshole comedian cowering away from the stammering need inside of him, there’s no way that road goes anywhere good. But he was a dick to that turtle this morning, so more likely that has something to do with it. Dream Turtle is a safe thing to believe in, because Dream Turtle, if nothing else, has made it this far. 

Richie’s not sure he can say the same for God.

“Please don’t make me do that again,” he says. “With the- with Almost-Stan. I can’t do that again.”

The turtle languorously shifts closer, and then dips its head to Richie’s arms. For a split second.Richie feels crazy with joy, literally unraveled with it. Amazingly, its little leathery turtle tongue darts out and starts macking on the drying pear juice on Richie’s arm.

“I love you,” Richie says. He says that to everyone, which is one of the stupidly transparent things about his stupid, transparent life, but he really means it now. “I love you, Dream Turtle. You and I might live forever, just the two of us. They’ll make the most epic sitcom about us in the laserpunk society that forms from our ashes in three hundred years.” 

Richie used to like, mega want to die all the time. But then things kept coming up- like, he had to check on his little outcrops of survivors, and he had to read the horrible post-apocalyptic series that Bill wrote in his twenties, and he had to figure out how to make a campfire without burning all his arm hair off, and now it's kind of fallen by the wayside. Richie was at least a little suicidal even before the apocalypse, so there’s no way that’s gotten  _ better,  _ it’s just not as pressing anymore.

Richie picks a slice of pear from the can and balances it on his tongue. It’s warm and liquid, and tastes exactly like he imagined. Dream Turtle’s tongue is rough, like a cat’s, in one of the funny sensations that he’d sort of accepted he would never experience again.

“Make me a deal,” he says through a mouthful of preservatives. “You tell me when it’s time to give up the ghost, okay? Lead the horse in for some Jello. Take the dog out with the daisies. Let me know before the slide to sucksville becomes, like, exponential. You can do that, right?” Dream Turtle has a little motor oil on its shell and a weirdly long tongue, and Richie believes it can do anything, the kind of wholehearted belief he knew as a kid. 

“Thanks,” Richie says. “You’re the bomb.”

He finishes the pears, one by one, watching the river divert around him. Then, he crawls out onto the bank like another dead thing and falls asleep with his head against the dirt.

He wakes up as the limousine takes on a speed bump with a frankly admirable amount of panache. 

For a moment, he feels like an Etch-a-Sketch placed in a barrel and pushed down Niagara Falls. Then someone grabs his arm and, working entirely on instinct, he pops them right in the sniffer. It’s a really good punch, too. He’s kind of proud of it. 

_ “Shit,”  _ his manager Steve says. Richie recognizes the voice, but everything that should come along with the recognition just writhes in his brain like a drowning worm. “What the fuck, Rich, give a guy a little warning.”

“Um,” Richie says. It’s dark, and he- he needs his glasses, where are his glasses? What happened to him? His body is absolutely, breathtakingly  _ wrong,  _ but not in the way he’s used to, with the fevers and infections and limbs rotting in slow-motion. He’s moving somewhere, he knows that, and a familiar sick feeling is spreading up from his chest. He’s gotten insanely good at blocking the urge to vomit in the last couple of years, but he doesn’t know if he can pull it off in this lanky mannequin of a body. “Help?” 

“Shit, are you having some kind of episode?” someone else says. Richie doesn’t know their name, but he feels like he should. The voice scratches at some odd, comatose part of his brain. “Dude, what did you take?”

“Nothing,” Richie says on autopilot. He brings a hand up, abstractly, and starts to touch his face. His cheeks are full. He pokes at the spot above his temple where he should have a gnarly scar, and is met with a clean emptiness, a feeling not unlike the unexpected end of a dark staircase. He gags on a shallow mouthful of blood and spits it into his fist. “Roll call here, uh, how many of you are supposed to be dead?” 

“Fucking hell, Richie- pull over!” Steve barks to the driver.

“Are you nuts?” the nameless guy says. “He needs to be there in twenty minutes.”

“He’s fucking  _ hyperventilating,  _ what do you want me to do?”

“Jesus Christ, stop touching your face, you look like-”

“Rich? Hey, Richie? You with-?”

“What’s wrong with him? What did you-?”

Richie leans forward and vomits, cleanly, onto his own shoes. The sight of partially-digested food fills him with a terror unlike any he’s ever experienced; on some loose instinct, he starts to grab at the door handle.

“Jesus! Fucking pull over!”

The car stops, and Richie tumbles out of it. He retches again, and then gags it back with an unprecedented force. He can’t afford to lose food, he’s  _ better  _ than this, he’s hardly ever scared anymore, he hardly ever feels the need to-

_ floating floating floating I know your dirty little filthy little selfish little- _

bring it all up.

Someone shoves a bottle of water into his hand and Richie gapes at it, like an idiot. Richie  _ has  _ water, he’s always had water, but the sight of the bottle washes up a weird, nostalgic need in him. He unscrews the top and downs half of it, water spilling onto the collar of his fancy, restrictive shirt.

He looks up. Cars are driving by, at speeds that make him dizzy, on a four-lane road. There are streetlamps dotting the road, all comfortingly lit, and he can see a faint ocean of houses beyond the treeline.

It’s hot as  _ shit. _

“Richie,” Steve says. His voice sounds- gentle maybe, Richie doesn’t know. He’s lost all ability to parse vocal cues. “What’s happening?”

“I don’t know,” Richie says.

Steve stares at him for what feels like several minutes. “Okay,” he says eventually. “Do I need to cancel?”

Richie blinks at his puke-stained shoes, uncomprehending. Logically, his manager asking if he needs to cancel probably indicates that he has a show somewhere, pretty soon. Richie gets that up to a point, but then his brain hits some kind of unbreachable mental block with  _ what the fuck  _ graffitied all over it and an artistic rendering of some guy’s dick in spray paint. Past that, it’s like his dozen or so brain cells have done the lemming thing and all jumped off a cliff to avoid having to think about being here, in the wrong place, in the wrong skeleton, in a world not half as ruined as it should be. 

_ “Fuck,”  _ Richie says, once he gets the right amount of air in his body. “What year is it?”

“What  _ year  _ is it?” Steve says. “Shit, dude, is this a bit?”

“Yeah,” Richie says. He forgets that he has water in his mouth and half of it slops down his front. The irrational spike of panic returns. “It’s a bit. Play the fuck along.”

“Christ,” Steve says. “Okay, Richie. It’s 2016.”

“Yeah,” Richie says. He thought that he’d experienced the full spectrum of emotions in the past few years, but whatever’s currently tearing up his chest is some wild new species of hurt, unmapped and incomprehensible. “That tracks.”

Steve grips his shoulder. Richie’s whole body jerks like it’s been dissected with a bolt of current, but then he leans into it, pathetically grateful for the touch. Steve’s hands are clean, and his nails are trimmed. Richie’s probably are too, but he can’t bring himself to look.

“It’s July,” he says. It’s not a question. He can taste the monster-breath in the air, the hungry heat unfolding from some dark cellar of the earth. They were wrong, when they were kids, thinking that summer was this big, broad, untouchable thing. He can smell something’s skin rotting under the city.

“Yeah, man,” Steve says. “Let’s get you back in the car, okay?”

Richie allows himself to be herded. He touches the nape of his neck, and is amazed to find that his hair is damp and soft, freshly-washed. His nails are smooth, and the only thing building up beneath them is dead skin. 

He isn’t hungry. It’s the most disorienting feeling. Richie hasn’t always been starving, but he hasn’t been  _ full  _ in years. He can still taste the pears at the back of his throat, a sweetness barely-distinguishable from the residual vomit, but there are other tastes too, ones he can’t even identify. Whiskey, probably, if it’s July 2016. 

Richie’s body ate a full meal likely less than an hour ago. Richie’s body doesn’t need to ration, to take slow steps to avoid burning calories. Richie’s body probably slept last night, and got wasted and vomited into the sink of his hotel room, without worrying about waste. Richie’s body showered earlier, probably stood under the hot water for forty-five minutes and shaved imprecisely with a nice razor and left hair plugging the drain, because Richie’s body belongs to a massive dickwad. 

He touches his stomach. The feeling of loose skin is so alien that he can almost convince himself that it’s some kind of parasite latched to his ribcage.

“Just get through tonight,” Steve is saying. The car pulls back onto the highway. “Okay? We’ll work it out later, whatever the fuck’s going on with you. Just don’t lose it right now.”

Richie fumbles around in his clothes, looking for a cigarette, and comes up with his glasses. He slides them on and the world instantly sharpens. The abundance of vision bewilders him, too; his glasses haven’t been clean or whole in years, and he sort of got used to guessing at outlines. Outside the car, the landscape yawns, open-chested and innocent, and he watches it zip by with an unfamiliar detachment. 

Richie slumps all the way against the window. The shadows lengthen and snap back as the car passes them. The road bristles with hollowed light, clean and whole and bodiless. The grass on the side of the rails looks young, unburnt and unbloodied.

Something nudges his toe, and when Richie looks down, there’s Dream Turtle.

“Oh,” Richie says aloud. It makes more sense, that this is a dream. It’s okay. He can’t save anyone, then. He never had the chance. A pitiful, decaying regret crawls along the lining of his throat, and he swallows it down. 

He ducks down and lifts the turtle from the footwell. It looks good- clean shell, skin a little softer than usual. He tucks it against his chest, cradled like a baby, and feels a little less like he’s about to swim out of his skin. He breathes, long and slow, and tastes air freshener and the reedy scent of beer.

“It’s good to see you,” he whispers to the turtle. “You look great, man. Been trying that Turtle Crossfit?”

“What was that?” Steve calls from the passenger seat.

Richie drags his pinky finger across the whorls of Dream Turtle’s shell. “Just figuring some shit out,” he calls, as lightly as he can manage.

He doesn’t feel like he can wake up from this the normal way. It feels like the dream has its talons around his ankle, and it’s just going to pull him further down. Maybe he’s finally dying. Maybe Dream Turtle was thinking,  _ yeah bud, might be time to call it quits on this hullabaloo,  _ and this is the result. 

“I’m going to go back to sleep,” he tells it. “If I’m supposed to wake up, it’ll be back on the river. Am I supposed to wake up?”

Dream Turtle turns toward him, eyes dark and tunneling.  _ I don’t know, Rich,  _ it seems to say.  _ Why don’t you find out? _

Richie leans his head against the glass. He sleeps, and dreams of splinters. He dreams of a fever growing like a forest fire, burning acres and acres of skin to the ground. 

Richie does wake up.

For a moment, he thinks that everything’s how he left it. There’s a familiar rushing sound, very distant, and his cheek is cold and his head hurts. All of this makes sense.

Then he sits up and hits his head on the seat in front of him.

He’s  _ still in the fucking limo.  _ He dreamed about- about something, some older and fatter July, but then he fell asleep in the dream and he’s still here, and he can smell weed and rancid butter and his skin is still jumbled and out-of-place, all kinds of body where there shouldn’t be. 

“You awake?” Steve says. He has a Juul in his hand. Some loose joke about that drifts through Richie’s head, disconnected from the rest of the world.

“I guess,” Richie says.

“Good enough,” Steve says. “Out.”

The parking lot is sweltering, a tight chest of pavement and smoke. Richie doesn’t recognize the building at first, but then he catches sight of the fire escape, high, high up and the perfect opening scene of the perfect tragedy, and thinks  _ oh.  _ Fear worms its way into his stomach so suddenly that it’s like he’s been injected with it. 

Richie ends up sitting in the green room with a turtle on his lap, to whom he is methodically feeding M&Ms from a bowl on the counter. He’s going to freak the hell out any second now. His fingers keep twitching, like every part of his body knows how wrong this is and he’s hoping to shudder his way back into the person he’s supposed to be. He alternates every twenty seconds between feeling completely calm and feeling like his entire body is disintegrating into a haze of formless terror. He keeps one hand on Dream Turtle’s head, because Dream Turtle won’t guide him wrong, not here, and keeps his eyes screwed shut.

Steve said  _ you sure you’re okay to go on,  _ and Richie’s mouth said  _ yeah,  _ and then he was left to this room, which is unfathomably bright and buzzing with air-conditioning. Richie is trying to think of one single coherent thing he could say to the crowd of people waiting for him to knock their socks off with some vaguely-offensive heterosexual bullshit, but his mind is eerily blank.

Richie stares at his reflection in the mirror for probably half an hour. He traces the outline of his face like some dumbass in a Lifetime movie, trying to pinpoint where the disjoints are, while Dream Turtle takes a nap in one of his sneakers. 

And then, just when he thinks that he really is going to evaporate here, under these scrutinizing lights and the knowledge that nothing outside of this room can possibly be real, his phone rings.

Richie immediately knocks it off the table.

_ -I got nervous, I got sick and I threw up- _

He dives to the floor and starts fumbling around for it, hands shaking hard enough to knock against the tile. It’s playing some song that he used to think was funny. He can’t make out a single lyric now, just the blare of trumpets against his jitterbugging pulse.

_ -I feel fine now, though, I feel . . . very relieved to be here with you guys- _

Richie’s fingers close around the phone and he hits  _ Accept  _ without looking at the number.

“Please tell me the clown is back,” he says, breathless. 

There’s a brief pause. Richie shoves his shaking hand up against the edge of the table hard enough to dig a line straight through his skin.

“As a matter of fact,” Mike Hanlon says, sounding bemused, and Richie’s mind clears entirely, smooths over as clean and calm as the rock he held in his thirteen-year-old fist right before it sailed into Henry Bowers’ eye, level and flat and at present untouched by blood, a violent love song all its own-  _ oh I would do anything for you, split anyone’s skin, wage war on age itself, oh we will crawl out of here with mud on our good jeans and more people to love, oh we are not dying this summer.  _


	2. Set 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Steve Covall and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.
> 
> (warnings for this chapter include references to canonical suicide, gore, and violence, canon-typical amounts of vomit, and Richie's feelings of debilitating wrongness)

It takes Richie about six minutes to do the Condensed History of Everything Has Gone to Shit over the phone, complete with brief lyrical interludes and a lot of charades.

“Okay, run that by me again,” Mike says. “And then maybe once more for good measure.”

Richie moves the phone away from his head by a very small amount. “He doesn’t believe me,” he tells Dream Turtle, mournful. “He doesn’t believe in you, that’s the problem. Man’s got something against deities that are commonly killed by plastic can rings.” Dream Turtle glares at him like  _ fuck you, oceanic pollution is no joke.  _

“Richie,” Mike says, sounding extremely resigned given that they’ve been talking for fifteen minutes max after thirty years apart. 

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Richie says. “I’m badass now.”

There’s a very long pause, and then Mike says, “Zombies, huh.”

“Yeah,” Richie says. “It’s a whole thing.”

“I really would have put money on it being more of a plague of locusts type situation.”

“I wasn’t actually paying a lot of attention to the insect life,” Richie says. 

“Okay,” Mike says. “Richie, are you-?” 

The pause is long enough that Richie starts folding and unfolding the edges of his shirt. Idly, he thinks about some of the things he  _ could be.  _

“Tired of camping?” he says. “Getting my 10,000 steps a day? Cooler than any one of you motherfuckers on account of apocalypse?”

“I was going to ask if you were okay,” Mike says.

Richie has to physically bite back the urge to turn this question over to the turtle.  _ What do you think, buddy, am I okay?  _ “Not really, Micycle.”

“Yeah,” Mike says. “God help me. I believe you.”

Someone bangs on Richie’s dressing room door. He pulls his head away from the phone and howls,  _ “Just a second, keep your pants on!” _

“Richie,” Mike says. “I’m not going to ask for anyone else. Can you come back to Derry?”

“What?” Richie says, “Like, now? I gotta go bullshit my way through a set I memorized five years ago, dude. I mean, I guess I could speed the public mental breakdown along some, make it really  _ pop,  _ but part of me thinks I should just go all out, right? I mean, since I’m here and I traveled oh so very far.” Some kind of 50s-leading-lady Voice pops out at the last second, but it feels monumentally stupid. 

“No,” Mike says. “Whatever happened last time, and everything since then- are you okay to come back? If you need to not come back- I mean, you remembered, you know what’s waiting.”

Richie’s brain abruptly declares that he  _ cannot be upright,  _ so he slides onto the floor. He’s thinking about Mike’s face, cribbed with both terror and shame, as It crawled along the cistern floor and chewed him out. Richie, skidding along the edges and propelled mostly by a deep and cavernous need for Mike to not die in fucking  _ Derry,  _ if anyone didn’t deserve-

Richie tries to halt that train of thought before it barrels into What Happened After That, but he doesn’t totally succeed. His brain screams for about ten seconds straight, and then quiets as quickly as if someone smothered it.

“Fucking  _ obviously  _ I’m coming,” Richie says. “I don’t know if you know this, Mike, but our friends all grew up to be devastatingly beautiful and you might need my gross ass around to keep it from just, like. Becoming a gangbang. One look at my stubble and you’ll be like,  _ yeah let’s crawl into the sewers instead.” _

He busies himself for the thirty seconds where Mike is audibly trying to parse that statement by tapping Dream Turtle’s head and seeing if it blinks every time.

“I appreciate your sacrifice,” Mike says. “Hey, we- we make it out okay, right? I’m not pulling you all into a suicide mission?”

One of the bloodstains on Richie’s glasses, when they pulled him out, had looked exactly like a mole he has right next to his belly button. He’d actually forgotten that until just now, but it was all he had been able to think about for the six miles between Neibolt Street and the quarry. The mole’s name is Bartholomew, so he had named the bloodstain Barty, and clung to it until he couldn’t hold on anymore. He digs around in the M&M bowl until he finds a red one, and holds it out for Dream Turtle’s appraisal.

“It’s gonna go great,” Richie says. “Like a well-oiled machine. Don’t worry, Mike. I’ve got it all figured out.” 

“Thank God,” Mike says. “Richie, you-”

A knock on the door, and then Steve’s voice. “Still alive in there, Tozier?”

Richie looks up, and is suddenly blindsided with a headache, sliding sideways across his skull. He’s gotten migraines ever since the deadlights, which was a fucking trip in the apocalypse, but this is a little tamer. He wants to say  _ yeah, alive and kind of baffled about it. How about you, Steve? Your organs peeling through your skin yet? _

“Right as rain, mah plum,” he says instead. 

“Then what the fuck are you doing?” Steve explodes. “Quit pussying around in there and go do your goddamn show, genius.”

“Jeepers,” Richie says after a moment. “Someone pissed in his Honey Bunches.”

“You should go, Rich,” Mike says. “Come to Derry. We’ll have dinner, and we can talk then.”

“I don’t want to hang up,” Richie says, and immediately feels stupid, like a teen babbling to her first boyfriend. Gee, Tozier, what a great time to try out this new thing about being honest to yourself and others. Why don’t you tell Mike how your hand is shaking so bad in your lap that you’re about to knock over your dish of complimentary M&Ms? Why don’t you tell Mike about how you’re actually a big old--?

“I get it,” Mike says. “I get it, I promise. I don’t- I don’t want to, either. It’s been twenty-four years, for me. How about you?”

Richie swallows hard. “Five,” he manages.

“Yeah,” Mike says. “It’s okay. It’s gonna be okay. We’ll make it, Rich.”

Richie doesn’t trust himself to speak. It used to be that Big Bill was the guy everyone would throw themselves into the sewers for, but the way that Mike is mobilizing the troops now seems  _ right,  _ like there’s not any other way their gang could’ve shaken out. If Mike says,  _ stand in a circle and chant this dumbass thing with your eyes closed,  _ Richie does it. If Mike says,  _ hey, let’s all go hunt for physical representations of our childhood trauma while being stalked by a homophobic murderclown,  _ Richie asks when he can clock in. And if Mike says,  _ we’re gonna be okay,  _ Richie starts to think that maybe not everything has to die this week.

“I’m going to hang up now,” Mike says, like coaxing an injured animal, telegraphing every movement before it happens. “I’ll see you in Derry. Buy you dinner.”

“No way you’re buying, Mr. Twenty-Four Years,” Richie says automatically. “I- okay. I’ll see you in Derry.”

Mike’s smile is beautiful, even half a country and half a lifetime away. “Knock their socks off, Trashmouth.”

The call ends. Richie stands up, as if in a dream, and all the blood rushes to his head. He feels like he used to on Saturdays, when he was a kid and parked himself in front of the TV for hours, marinating in his own morning-sweat. Nothing feels real anymore, like he’s stood up into a play-world that he’s allowed to inhabit for a little while until the real shit starts.

Until he goes back to Derry.

He opens the door, and Steve is standing  _ right  _ on the other side, looking pissed as all hell. “Sorry to cut your phone sex short, but believe it or not, you’re actually being paid to do something here.”

“Wakawakawaka,” Richie says, because he remembers two things about Richie Tozier in 2016-- one, he was morbidly terrified of himself, of people touching him, of people looking at him, and of the stage, and two, that he dropped into Fozzie Bear when stressed.

“Christ,” Steve says. He grabs Richie’s shoulder and starts to herd him down the hall. “I can’t handle you.”

“Believe it or not, that’s what  _ you’re  _ being paid to do,” Richie says. 

“Oh, the jokester’s back,” Steve says. “I hope you’re not planning to do the time-travel bit onstage.” 

Richie imagines it-- falling off the stage, sobbing and vomiting into the first row, hands tangled up in his hair.  _ Why is everyone so young, why is everyone so alive and unafraid.  _ He could whip Dream Turtle out at the end, shake him like the cosmic proof that Trashmouth can have entertainment value.  _ Look at this fucker! I’ve been worshipping him! Feeding him candy! Isn’t this the best public breakdown you’ll ever see!?  _

It has merit.

“Did you or did you not see my Netflix special?” Richie says instead. “There is nowhere for me to go but up, my friend.”

“Funny, I’ve been saying that to myself for years,” Steve says. 

Somewhere in all of this, his hand has latched around Richie’s arm. On some other plane of reality, it’s kind of funny, because he’s got the same look on his face that Richie’s dad always used to when he was saying  _ that’s a very nice bug, Rich, but how about getting to the bus stop on time?  _ Richie’s palms are really sweaty, and he’s starting to wonder if he’s ever going to relearn how to be touched by people. He thinks about dry-heaving with his whole head in the sink every Friday night for ten years, and wonders if he ever knew. 

His gaze flicks down for half a second-- just long enough to register Steve’s skin, and Richie’s skin, and Steve’s long fingers and clean nails and Richie’s  _ wrists  _ oh God there’s something about wrists, there’s something about  _ fucking-- _

“Fuck!” Richie howls, loud enough that they probably hear it in the audience. He scrabbles his hand over Steve’s, yanking it off.  _ “Shit!  _ I’m a fucking-- shit-eating  _ asshole,  _ god-fucking--”

“What the hell?” Steve says.

Richie bursts into tears and sprints back down the hall. He collides with two sound techs who are probably going to write Twitter threads about it later funnier than anything Richie’s done in the last three years. He runs into the wall going around the corner, Steve shouting incomprehensibly at his back, and fights with the doorknob for what feels like a small, deadlights eternity before wrenching the green room open.

“I’m a fuckface!” Richie yells to Dream Turtle, who is intently examining himself in the mirror. “I’m a massive cocksucking fuckface who kills everyone he loves!”

Steve is banging on the door, but Richie literally could not care less. He fumbles with his phone, drops it twice, and then blindly mashes at buttons until, miraculously, Mike’s name pops back onto the screen.

Mike answers while the Richie’s Brain Train is still going full steam ahead into a horrific tunnel filled with murderclowns, so there’s a brief disjoint while Richie is still screaming and Mike is making more and more urgent noises on the other end.

“I’m a shit!” Richie says. “I’m a fucking--  _ Mike,  _ Micycle, I failed, I fucking failed, it’s been  _ two hours  _ and I fucked it all up, I’m so sorry--”

_ “Richie,”  _ Mike says. Richie keeps babbling.

“I didn’t-- I didn’t mean-- you have to call him, Mike, you have to call him and make that fucker stay on the line until he’s on the  _ plane,  _ okay? You gotta-- I’ll screw it up, I will, it can’t be me. It can’t be me.”

“Beep beep!” Mike shouts, and Richie shuts up. “Hey,” Mike continues, much softer. “Richie, hey, what’s going on? You were fine like, two minutes ago.”

Horrifically, Richie responds to this with a loud, painful sob.

“Okay,” Mike says. He’s still shouting, but he might not realize it. “I’m going to, uh-- I think we need to see each other, I’m gonna--”

The call ends, and then Richie’s phone rings again. He blinks at it, uncomprehending, and then realizes that this one is a FaceTime request. He accepts mainly because he doesn’t know what else to do.

Mike’s face fills the screen. Just looking at it forces a couple good lungfuls of air into Richie’s chest. Mike starts counting, which seems like a really weird thing to do until Richie realizes that his breaths are following him, keeping a pattern that won’t cause him to pass out on the floor negative five minutes before he’s supposed to go on. 

“Shit,” Richie says, once he’s able to do so.

“I’ll say,” Mike says. His eyes are all dewy and concerned, an expression Richie had previously thought belonged only to his goldfish and Ben Hanscom. Richie checks his own face automatically in the little screen up in the corner, and is not at all comforted by how blotchy and teary he is. 

“Mike,” Richie says, with as much urgency as he can muster. “You have to call Stan back.”

There’s a brief pause. Richie thinks about Almost-Stan, the whole empty state reflected in his eyes, Nebraska burning and the grocery store disintegrating and nothing really mattering anymore. 

“I didn’t call Stan,” Mike says. “I called you and Bill. I was about to do Eddie.”

Because Richie is the most predictable motherfucker on the planet, his lungs seize and dive-bomb his stomach at Eddie’s name. He forces it down, a feeling not unlike trying not to puke. He takes two huge breaths, but there’s still not enough air in his mouth to talk, so he has to give it another minute or so. Mike waits, all patient-like.

In Richie’s head, Stan slides into the bath and then out of it and then into it and out of it, like a glitchy VCR, the ones where even banging the TV didn’t work. Stan opens his skin and then it reseals. Stan finishes a puzzle. The puzzle discombobulates, rolls like useless organs around the table. Richie can’t settle on a story. Stan is dead, but then he’s alive. He’s dead, but then he’s sitting up and walking and driving across the country to wait in the parking lot of a Dick’s Sporting Goods for five years. The water fills with blood. 

The water fills with blood. 

The water fills with--

“Don’t call Stan,” Richie says. He’s amazed that he’s retained the capacity for verbal communication. “I’ll drop in on him, give him the low-down. The ol’ one-two. The Yankee Doodle.”

“The Yankee Doodle,” Mike repeats, in the tone of someone who wants to pursue that but very tragically can’t, due to the pressing time commitment of aforementioned murderclowns and the slow, sweet broil of PTSD, et cetera et cetera. 

“You heard me,” Richie says. His organs start a slow melt under his skin, which has rotted almost clean-- no. His organs are fine. His skin is fine. He’s still talking,  _ yowza.  _ “Actually, I was kind of thinking maybe, we don’t have to tell him at all?” 

“I don’t know what things are like where you’re from,” Mike says carefully, “but I’ve been doing research. It requires all of us, Rich. The circle has to remain unbroken.”

“Yeah, okay, I know that,” Richie says, but he’s not thinking of circles. He’s thinking of a woman named Patty Uris who makes the best potato leek soup in America. The look on Bev’s face when she whispered  _ in the bathtub,  _ like Stan’s death was a play or something, operatic in its repetition. The water fills with blood, the water,  _ no,  _ the water’s fine. Richie’s fine. “I just-- he’s kinda got a good thing going on, Mike, and the whole circle deal is bullshit anyway.”

“You know I wouldn’t,” Mike starts, and then audibly stops. “What do you mean,  _ bullshit?” _

Richie winces. “Uh.”

“You said it went like clockwork.”

“Clocks get janked up sometimes,” Richie says, “through no fault of the, uh, clockmaker. It’s just, like, some of us have nothing better to do than throw our careers off the rails and face every demon we’ve got at once, but some of us probably have plans this week, like making fancy dinners with  _ basil  _ and writing love limericks for our beautiful wives. And I’m just.” Blood in the--  _ in the bathtub,  _ Bev’s eyes wide and wet like a movie star, car starting, Eddie with a suitcase in each hand, making his way down the stairs. “I don’t want Stan to, uh. To have to.”

“Richie,” Mike says. “Does it work without Stan?”

“I don’t know,” Richie says. “I just. I don’t want him to.”

“I won’t call,” Mike says. “Visit, like you planned. Call me when you get there and we can talk.”

“Cool beans,” Richie says. He’s crying again, which is just horrible, really. “But if we didn’t have to get Stan involved, could I just come to Derry?”

He sounds like a kid, bargaining with God or whatever over grasshopper legs and the math homework he forgot to do. It doesn’t take long, for Derry to get inside you and pull you all the way back. Even when there’s nothing to go back to.

“Stan’s already involved,” Mike says, and yeah, Richie knows it. Stan’s been there from day one. One quarter of the Original Flavor Losers. “Tell him what you told me. Let him decide.”

_ Let him decide  _ turns into  _ guess Stanley could not cut it  _ within less than a day. But maybe if Richie was there to hold his hand, to say that death is temporary but really fucking sucks, to turn off the water or turn it ice cold and splash him through the shirt, he might make a different decision.

Richie thinks about Patty Uris, two months before the end of the world, sourdough starter on her corduroy pants and nails painted bright purple. She’d let Richie garden with her, because she was bad at gardening and he was worse but they needed to do something if Stan’s daffodils were going to make it. He remembers that they accidentally tore up the whole root system. They’d cried for about two hours, sunny and April and surrounded with headless flowers. He’d wiped grubs on her shoulder and pretended they were boogers. 

“Okay,” Richie says. He examines his own face, which is goopy and asymmetrical and connects not at all to what he understands of himself, but he’s getting used to that. 

“Convince him, if you can,” Mike says. “I think we could really use him.”

Patty had brought out special napkins for Richie to wipe his gross, teary face on. Richie’s whole body hunches with something he’s pretty sure is shame. Or the pure, concentrated force of his own selfishness. He’d forgotten how hard it is to be a person when there are other people everywhere, crawling all over your life and decisions and understanding of the world.

“Of course we could use him,” Richie hears himself say. “He’s  _ Stan.” _

“Yeah,” Mike says. “So if I-- if I had called him--”

“Don’t think about it,” Richie says, like a hypocrite. “Lock that shit  _ down,  _ Hanlon. Your brain-rooster can scream all it wants as long as it stays in its little bad-vibes henhouse, okay? But if it wanders all around the farm, it’s gonna get eaten by a motherfucking eagle.”

“Right,” Mike says after a moment. “Okay. I just don’t-- I don’t want him to either. I don’t want anybody to have to.”

“I love you,” Richie tells him. Dream Turtle looks up, like  _ okay, if you’re gonna start saying that to everyone it makes what we have a lot less special.  _ “Nothing’s your fault.”

Mike snorts. It sounds a little wet. “Same to you, Trashmouth.”

Richie could have been blameless, once, but he’s not anymore. He came back. He can almost feel the devastation of Derry tilting on its monstrous axis, sliding into his hands. Everything from this point forward becomes something he made happen or something he allowed to happen.

“Is there anything else I need to know?” Mike says, and for the life of him Richie  _ can’t remember.  _ He remembers the gong, the way it burned in the backs of his teeth. He remembers practicing his Pennywise impression in the hotel room for like, an hour and a half the night before they found the clubhouse.  _ Time to float-- time to float!  _ Giggling at himself while slumped against the medicine cabinet. Those are the only distinct moments, everything else washed away in a blur of deadlights and blood and an all-consuming grief like a digestive organ.

“I don’t know,” Richie says. “I guess that’s it.”

“Text me,” Mike says. “Save my number. Anything else you remember, even something tiny. The weather. Text me any of it.”

“Dude, the emojis I’m gonna use to tell you about the weather will be downright pornographic,” Richie says, “and you’ll have brought it on yourself.”

“You would’ve made any of it pornographic,” Mike says. “Update me about-- about your trip. Let me know when you get there. Seven out of seven, okay?”

“Seven out of seven,” Richie says, and then he hangs up because it feels like the kind of dramatic line where you’re supposed to hang up after. Some heavy, twitching mass grabs the corners of his chest and pulls them down, down, down, all the way into the parking lot. He kinda wishes he’d said goodbye to Mike, who stayed in Derry his whole life and only got to see a tiny piece of the world before it ended. He turns to Dream Turtle instead. 

“Seven out of seven,” he repeats. “You can do that for me, right?”

Dream Turtle looks at him like,  _ you insensitive bitch, I cannot count that high. _

Richie gets up. He fumbles in his pockets, but there’s nothing to fumble with. His hands are weirdly smooth, and it’s starting to freak him out. He can’t really guess what’s going to freak him out anymore-- it used to be kind of predictable, but his body’s alarm system has been rewired by some post-apocalyptic hooligan and now he’s got no idea where the landmines are hidden.

In his head, Stan finishes the puzzle. Stan finishes the puzzle. Stan finishes the puzzle and looks up and his smile is so bright and beautiful, his face a child’s face. His body the body of a zombie in Nebraska, a man who in all likelihood is already dead.

The sum total of people Richie saves, if he saves anyone, is going to be infinitesimally small. And the tragedy, the big honkin’ tragedy that’s coming for them all, won’t have slowed down a minute. In some of his memory, the sky was red as a new scab, but that can’t have been real. He makes things up, sometimes. Stuff sorts out differently inside his head and out of it. 

Someone pounds on the door. 

Richie crosses the room and yanks it open with his most winning smile. “Miss me?” he says, and then immediately bends over and throws up into his hands.

_ “God,”  _ Steve says. 

Against all odds, Richie actually does make it onstage. He’s sweating buckets in the newest of his body’s attempts to reject this foreign, neckbearded entity, and his mouth has maybe more Altoids in it than teeth right now, but he makes it onstage. 

“Sorry for the delay, folks,” he says. He grabs the microphone, stands unnecessarily close to it. There are a lot of fucking people in the audience, more people than he’s seen alive in the last two years combined. “Had a breakdown about how it’s 2016. We’ve all been there. You guys look awesome, by the way, very alive, super full of skin. Keep that up.”

He blinks eight times in quick succession and then tilts his head up, which is a mistake. White chews out the entirety of his vision, drowns him completely. 

“I’ve been thinking about the apocalypse a lot,” he manages. The spotlight has its own heartbeat, throwing itself like a wild animal against the corners of the stage. “Like, I know that professional comedians are going to go extinct-- as we very much fucking should-- and I’m probably gonna have to burn my resume so I can pretend to be one of y’all and not get immediately voted as the first one eaten. So I’ve been working out other job options, just in case things fall through big-time.”

Deep breath. Don’t look at your hands. Don’t look at the audience. Don’t look at the  _ lights,  _ Christ, the way they make everything just a parody of themselves. “I’ve got the perfect solution, though, so hear me out: UberEats driver.” 

He keeps talking, but he can’t seem to hear what he’s saying. It comes out of his mouth, and then garbles on its way to his ears. He’s relatively sure he’s not just spouting gibberish, because the front three rows are all laughing, mouths open, clutching the armrests, and nobody’s got their phone out to film Trashmouth Tozier’s live-audience stroke. He can sense himself rocking back and forth on his heels, which is a habit it took him months to break when he was first getting into comedy. The mic stand rocks with him, stuck to his hand. 

When Richie looks up again, he’s caught in the deadlights. 

Back in the good ol’ apocalypse days, he could expect to be caught in the deadlights between two and three times a week. There could be anything-- a headlamp cutting through a dark swath of farmland, the full moon without air pollution, the two seconds after he found the light switch at the Walmart every other Tuesday. It used to be that the shadows left at the edges of his vision were just blots of color, after looking away from something bright, but these days they’re shapes. People. People falling and falling and a meteorite twisting up the sky like an empty Doritos bag, like the fuse of a Molotov cocktail, people crying pure blood and spit and drowning, drowning and looking down the sewers even though they shouldn’t, it’s not safe, Richie  _ always  _ tells them that it’s not safe. 

Here, onstage, jokes still dripping from his mouth and head tilted upward, Richie understands that there was never any world where he escaped. 

You can spend your whole life barreling toward something, and never even know what it is. You can forget how you’re going to die for twenty-seven years, but it doesn’t save you. Richie used to dry-swallow pain medication before he went onstage because he was wound so tight he got blinding headaches for hours, and it was easier to stock up on ibuprofen than to try to deal with his anxiety. His dreams weren’t premonitions, but almost always involved bodies twitching in the dark. The lights gnaw at the inside of his skull. The lights soak his vertebrae. The lights nest between his ribs and nasal cavities. 

Richie takes a deep, swarming breath, and--

\--the plane touches down at the Atlanta airport.

Richie watches the tarmac smooth out. It’s raining lightly, big soft circles on the windows. Just to make sure, Richie pulls out his phone and sends Mike about eighteen triple-water-drop emojis. 

“Hey,” he says, turning to the sixty-year-old woman next to him. “Did I puke?”

She gives him a look filled with such complete loathing that he’s sure the answer must be  _ yes,  _ but she shakes her head tightly. 

“Cool beans,” he says, refocusing on the back of the seat in front of him.

Getting off the plane takes more steps than he’d anticipated. He has to release Dream Turtle’s idiot head from the plastic cup it is currently stuck inside, where he is determinedly trying to lick the melting ice from the sides. He has to root around in the overhead for six minutes until he comes to the conclusion that he brought absolutely nothing with him. He turns on his phone for half a second, then turns it off again in a panic before he can see what all his notifications are about, because there’s a  _ lot of them.  _

The airport is a special kind of nightmare. Richie’s eighty percent sure that he’s never seen this many people in one place before in his life, all bumping elbows and racing each other’s wheeled duffel bags, a tight-fisted dogtrack fueled by caffeine, aching calves, and a need to get somewhere as quickly as possible.

Actually, now that he thinks about it, Richie’s not convinced that this many people exist in the world, full stop. Surely even before the world blipped out, there weren’t  _ this many  _ people in it, or nobody would ever be able to handle going anywhere or doing anything. So this is just a mirage, or a clever illusion designed by Dream Turtle. 

Then again, if Dream Turtle created the world, it probably cost him one hundred percent of his brain cells. Natural selection should’ve taken out that motherfucker’s whole family tree generations ago.

The street immediately outside the Atlanta airport is so overwhelming that Richie briefly considers going back inside and finding an Auntie Anne’s oven to curl up in. He wants to call an Uber, but that would involve unlocking his phone, which feels like a very  _ no bueno  _ move. Instead, he stands on the curb for three whole hours until he finally has the good sense to stick his thumb out.

The car that eventually rolls to a stop is, delightfully, a pickup truck. The guy within has huge arms and a fuckton of neck hair. Richie idly considers asking him to have sex with him, because he’s effectively been cockblocked his whole life by first the staggering pressure of his own internal homophobia, and then the zombie apocalypse, and a guy's gotta let loose sometime.

However, it’s worth considering that he hasn’t even held anyone’s hand in over five years, and if someone touched him under the shirt, he would die immediately.

“Need a ride?” the guy asks. His accent is obnoxiously Southern, and comes as such a relief to Richie that he sags against the door. Christ. Finally, something right with the world.

“Please.” Richie gets in the car, shuts it behind him. The horrific bray of the Atlanta highway dulls down to a general crawling feeling on the back of his neck.

“Where you heading?” the driver says. It sounds more like  _ whirya heddin. _

“Salvation,” Richie says.

There’s an awkward pause while the driver watches Richie untangle Dream Turtle from the seatbelt.

“I’m not taking you to the Sasquatch Museum,” he says.  _ Sazquadge. _ “It’s too out of the way.”

Stanley Uris, age thirteen, took a lot of baths. It was one of the few things that Richie never made fun of him for. It was a weird fucking thing, to exist inside your body in Derry in 1990, especially when your body was changing into something whack and new and viciously ungroovy, and the old body had just last year been your only defense against the thing that swallowed Derry children whole. 

He would go home from the quarry. He would start the water. He would listen to it fill. Once he got in, once he had scrubbed the undersides of his nails and the dead skin behind his knees, he would submerge his ears, almost his whole head, and pretend that he had been born there. That he had never known land. 

He would pretend to float.

Richie is standing on Patty Uris’ porch. It is also technically Stan’s porch, as of right now, as of July 2016 as Richie is living it this time around. But Stan never stood on that step and poured Richie a glass of tea so sweet it made his gums hurt. Stan didn’t detangle Richie, weeping and shuddering, from the hammock as the sun crawled higher and higher in the unforgiving Georgia sky, dimpled like a belly button against the universe. And then Stan didn’t hold Richie’s hand and talk to him about grasshoppers for forty minutes until the heat got too bad, and the mourners’ brigade retreated inside.

All that to say, Richie is standing on Patty Uris’ porch. 

Richie is definitely going to ring the doorbell very soon and Richie is not! Going! To make it weird!

The door opens before he gets a chance to knock, and lo and behold, there’s Patty Uris, stepping onto her porch with a garbage bag dangling from one hand.

Richie rocks back on his heels and says the thing he’s been thinking about the whole car ride over here, which is, “What’s the sex like?”

Oh God, he’s gonna  _ die. _

“Excuse me?” Patty Uris says. Her hair is up. She was smiling before she opened the door, over her shoulder, to someone inside the house. 

In some other world, she’s getting out the gloves and garbage bags, she’s calling her mom, she’s,  _ no,  _ she’s sitting on her neighbor’s porch unable to cry, yet, unable to feel anything other than this horrible, sinking--

“Does he make birdcalls when he pops the cork?” Richie says. “Shit, you know you’re doing it right when he starts moving into that woolly thrusher, that’s the spot right there.”

“Honey,” Patty calls, without taking her eyes off Richie. “There’s a moderately-famous comedian on our porch talking about our sex life.”

Something is, very distinctly, knocked over inside the Uris household.

“The woolly thrusher doesn’t exist,” Patty tells him. “You made that up.”

“Obviously I made it up,” Richie says. “Did you expect me to have enough information in my brain to make that joke funny?”

Stan’s head pops up above Patty’s shoulder and  _ oh. _

Oh.

The zombie didn’t look that much like him, actually. Too thin, too square of a jaw. Too  _ dead,  _ too clearly gone from the world. Stan doesn’t look like that.

Stan looks happy.

“Do you remember me?” Richie says. His chest. His chest hurts like a cattle prod.

“I,” Stan says. He squints. He has reading glasses on the top of his head, adorably. He probably spends twenty minutes a day looking for them before he can read the New Yorker. “I just read about you on Twitter.”

“Nice,” Richie says. His whole body, actually, violently held by some electric pulse. “Am I trending?”

“Uh,” Stan says lamely, “yeah.”

“As I should be,” Richie says. “Hey man, so you might think you never lived anywhere near Maine, but in fact you grew up in this little murdertown called Derry, and I was your number one fan there. I went to your bar mitzvah. I shook your zayde’s hand and told him that you were growing into a fine young man, and he thought the dumb accent I used was my real actual voice.”

“Richie?” Stan says.

“Trashmouth,” Richie corrects, and then he grins. Stan grins back and then, suddenly, they’re hugging.

Hugging is a  _ lot.  _ Richie’s brain beeps at him weakly a few times and then fries completely, and he finds himself holding onto Stan’s wire-rack shoulders hard enough to bruise, breathing in the scent of hand soap and garlic and  _ Stan,  _ and human being, real live human being in Richie’s arms, holding Richie, not letting Richie go. 

With that one remembered thing, that  _ Richie,  _ will eventually come  _ beats spending it inside of your mother,  _ will come  _ it’s summer! we’re kids!  _ and then  _ I’m going to have to kill this fucking clown, I’m going to have to, I’m going to have to kill, I’m, this FUCKING clown,  _ and from there who knows what, but Patty Uris is smiling again like she was before she opened the door, and Stan turns the water on, Stan turns the water on, Stan turns away and grins and says  _ Richie?  _ and then becomes warm skin against Richie’s skin. The water fills with-- the water fills with seven grimy kids, shouting and holding baseball bats and ready to leave the dark now, ready to get back to the world. The water's okay.

Richie is okay.

“We’re gonna make it,” Richie whispers, as if he can make it true just by getting it out of his body and into Stan’s brain.

“The clown,” Stan manages.

“Clown?” Patty says, with a terrible voice like she already knows, the same terrible voice that Beverly once slipped on to say _in the bathtub,_ to tell the future a few hours too late. "What clown?"

“The goddamn clown,” Richie says cheerfully, except that his voice gets horribly mangled somewhere in his throat. He pulls away, claps Stan on the side of the neck. Every cell in his body surges for more contact, a free-for-all against the nefarious barrier of Richie’s skin and six inches of space. “Got it in one. Invite me in, Staniel, and I’ll tell you how to kill it.”


End file.
